Surprising Findings About E-Book Prices

You might actually save by buying a hardcover instead

Are you paying more than you should for your e-books? It’s possible, a survey of the pricing of e-books in the U.K. found.

The survey, reported in the the Daily Mail, found that prices for best-selling books — including J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy — were higher for the electronic rather than the hardback version. The Casual Vacancy is selling for £9 in hardback and £11.99 as an e-book from Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Other books in the survey include The Chronicles of Downton Abbey and David Mitchell: Back Story as well as others.

The survey comes in the wake of a ruling by the European Union that popular e-book sellers such as Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Amazon had colluded with publishers to keep the pricing of e-books artificially high. The ruling included publishers Harper-Collins, Holtzbrinck, Simon & Shuster and Hachette Livre among others.

In the U.S., Judge Denise Cote ruled on Sept. 6 that e-book prices had been kept artificially high as well.